Thursday, 6 October 2011

To build this linear actuator I stripped off from a scanner the motor + gears along with the timing belt and the pulley. I bought in Brico a cheap drawer slider and screwed it all into a piece of wood.

First the video showing off what all this is about

Below you can find a pic of one end of the actuator:

As you can see, I attached the stepper to the piece of wood by just using a wire, and it works great!
Also note that zigzag piece of metal that links the timing belt with the drawer rail. In the picture below you can see it in more detail

The timing belt is sandwiched between two pieces of metal.

And finally below you can see the pulley at the other end, this was a tricky part, keep reading more the details!

This pulley had an axis that was riveted to the chassis of the scanner, I pulled it off with my pliers and welded it into a screw using solder, I had to heat both parts for a long time before in order to get the solder to bind both parts, the picture below shows the results:

And voila, its working better than I expected! Keep tuned for more and thanks for reading!